E-commerce Tracking in WooCommerce: 45 tools to use with GA

In 2017, you will be looking forward to steering your WooCommerce Store through another milestone. You see, the thing with online stores is that you constantly need to dig deep into analytics for e-commerce tracking in woocommerce, get those actionable insights from data, and transform it into more customers, more sales, more revenues, and more profits. 

So, let’s help you make more money, Shall we?

Note: We are not asking store owners to stop using WooCommerce Google Analytics Integration. We want to highlight how using other tools together with it can help you overcome certain limitations and get more out of data. 

Why is Linking GA to WooCommerce not enough?

While e-commerce tracking with Google Analytics is a great way to understand how your store is performing, it still lacks on certain points which might not give you a complete picture.

To deep dive into WooCommerce Conversion Tracking, you need much more. Here are some things, we found to be lacking in GA…

1. Understanding individual Customers

The modern E-Commerce no longer allows for shabby data collection. The one with the most meaningful information draws the most insightful business decision. And very surely, Google Analytics does not render the most meaningful information — things you need to know in detail about your customers.

Stuff like who came from where landed at which place, went to where thereafter, was interested in which area of which page, and how much time he chose to spend looking at your stuff…..are important for any business to know, before chalking out their one-to-one marketing activities.

And don’t we know enough about how important it is, to set up the individual rapport with customers? GA would give you insight into your visitors’ on-page action points. It does not allow you to look deep into each customer’s profile and see, what is that one string that can play music here.

2. Narrow segmentation

Segmentation criteria are important to clearly bifurcate who you should target next. Demographics alone are a bad indicator of who your loyal audience is. There are a lot more important factors, specifically when it comes to e-commerce.

The device being used, revenue generated per visit, E-Commerce conversion rate, and the number of transactions are some of the important points that every store owner should keep track of.

The most terrible problem with GA is its sampling. Anything beyond 50k visitors is swept out of the sample. So the data that you get in your reports is not holistic.

Moreover, you grasp the ‘What’, but the ‘Why’ never becomes clear. Tools with wider segment indicators help you profile your customers better and then analyse their behavior.

3. Engagement vortex on pages

There are hot spots on every page — areas that seem to attract and hold onto visitors, more than other areas of the page do. That might be specific product information, the mention of an offer, or simply, a clickable image that leads to an inner page and then to the sales cart. These are important vortex points on pages.

People either go further on the user journey while touching these points, or they drop their journey from here. Keeping an open eye for what’s going on at these points, is important to determine what improvements, in any, need to be done on each page.

Keeping track of such behavior on a micro level for every visit, also helps you weave your one-to-one customer communication in a more valued manner.

4. Knowing the repeat visitors

Your repeat visitors are those people who are in love with you. They come back to see how you are doing, and what new is cooking at your end, and probably make a few exchanges with you.

GA does not give a picture of who the repeat visitors are. You just get a percentage of a sample, that keeps coming back to your website.

So while you know that 70% of all your visitors are more or less crazy about you, you have no way to tell them how crazy you are about them! The craze dies down slowly without abundant personal communication, and eventually, you lose out on that audience mass. Not cool.

5. Inadequate reports

GA would render reports according to segments that you choose to see, a thing which is quite good. But then too, the reports are rigid. There is no way you can customize the nature of the reports. So if you are considering 5 metrics, you get 5 different reports at the end, instead of one that summarizes all of it.

And, this is why my friend Google Analytics E-commerce Tracking will not be enough for your WooCommerce Store in 2017. 

We have nothing against GA, it is a great tool and will remain so, but just as all software have limitations, GA is not exception. It meets a certain set of needs and when you move beyond those, you need to use other tools in conjunction with GA to get the best insights and earn more profits. 

Are you looking at the right metrics for tracking the e-commerce sales of your WooCommerce Shop?

As an online store owner, you must be doing enhanced e-commerce tracking but which metrics are you looking at?

Are you just relying on metrics like these –

• No. of orders
• Page views
• Revenue

eCommerce expert Bill D’Alessandro describes such metrics as Vanity Metrics because let’s say you solely rely on your revenues and decide to send coupons every time your revenues hit new milestones, you will be falling into a trap. Instead, an alternative metric to measure that gives you a more realistic picture is the — Gross Profit Margin.

Here are 10 metrics (the last one is the most important) you must measure for E-commerce Tracking WooCommerce

• Profit Per Visitor
• Gross Profit Margin
• Conversion Rate by Product
• Segmented Conversion Rate
• Revenue by Traffic Source
• Percentage of Returning Customers
• Funnel abandonment rates
• Unique purchases
• Frequency & Visitor Recency
• Life Time Value (LTV) of your Customers

45 Tools to use with Google Analytics

Here is the big fat list of 45 tools you can use alongside Google Analytics with WooCommerce Integration to skyrocket your sales, improve customer support, and empower your team to make better decisions.

1. KissMetrics — When you want to track people instead of sessions, KissMetrics is your tool. From funnel reports to event tagging & learning how people are engaging with specific events, KissMetrics can be pretty useful when it comes to cohort analysis, person tracking, and funnel tracking. If you are an early-stage WooCommerce start-up, you can consider this tool.
2. MixPanel — For people who want to focus on conversions, MixPanel is the way to go. It’s expensive but can do wonders for your online store. The tool offers rich insights into how many people are clicking on your CTA buttons, how many people are leaving onboarding, how your UTM campaigns are going, tracking active users etc, retention and other traction metrics. For those who are serious about scaling their WooCommerce stores, go for MixPanel. It wins the customization game against Google Analytics.
3. Ometria — When you run an e-commerce business, you need more than just analytics. Marketing automation is a must today. Ometria fills this gap. From understanding customer behavior to sending targeted marketing messages and measuring performance, it has it all.
4. Woopra — This is a God-sent tool for online retailers. When you use Woopra, you need nothing more. From real-time analytics, to knowing why your customers are not moving past the check-out process to understanding your loyal customers, Woopra is a must-try. The best part is it’s free (of course, up to limited actions per month). And, if you want to use it together with Google Analytics in your WooCommerce store, here’s a tiny little plugin — WooCommerce Enhanced Ecommerce Tracking — which will let you track conversions on Woopra and GoSquared. (It also has ability to track conversions from Facebook and Twitter ads, as well as your campaigns with Google Adwords)
5. GoSquared — If you are looking for a tool that offers analytics, customer support, sales and marketing information, GoSquared is the one to go for. It’s the all in one platform. From real-time analytics to CRM, you get accurate data to make business-transforming decisions. You can use Woopra, GoSquared and GA together in your WooCommerce store with the same plugin as mentioned in the above point.
6. Jirafe — Converting visitors into buyers and then converting those buyers into repeat customers is one of the major hurdles for online store owners. Jirafe’s USP is that it helps retailers make data-driven marketing decisions and provides actionable insights on how to re-engage visitors and inactive customers. More than 80,000 merchants across the globe use this tool.
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7. SumoMe — Not exactly an analytics tool, but this should be in your toolbox if you want to grow your WooCommerce store and track its success.
8. Divvit — This one is a Proactive Ecommerce Analytics tool with a firm focus on E-commerce. Divvit provides real-time data and projections and allows you to collect data from other social media, marketing and sales platforms.
9. Conversio — With advanced website analytics and all-in-one marketing dashboard, Conversion can be the best investment you ever make for your WooCommerce shop. From helping you recover abandoned carts to keeping your customers engaged, it’s one of the most promising e-commerce analytics tools in 2017.
10. Glew — Tap into the metrics that matter and do smarter marketing for your WooCommerce shop in 2017 with this tool. Understand revenue segment wise, improve your average order value, segment products, track seasonal fluctuations etc. using Glew and make your WooCommerce store into a super-converting, money minting machine.
11. RJ Metrics — Recently acquired by Magento, but you can still connect RJMetrics to your WooCommerce store and start gathering rich data, get insights and make better e-commerce decisions. Acquiring and retaining customers is a tough nut to crack but RJMetrics will help you crack it.
12. RetentionGrid — Try this tool for creating custom segments, knowing customer lifecycle analytics to tracking repeating orders, RetentionGrid also helps you run campaigns to recover abandoned shopping carts by 30–40%.
13. Clicky Tool — The simplest of all e-commerce analytics tools for WooCommerce, Clicky focuses on monitoring and analyzing real-time data. Good tool to start with.
14. Segment — Use Segment alongside Google Analytics to get more out of your store’s data. It gathers data from the analytics tools you are using and represents it together in one dashboard. It helps you gather data from every customer touch point.
15. Amplitude — Similar to MixPanel, Amplitude is a good alternative as it as a higher event limit. Flexibility, speed as it is very fast for getting queries and results, the cohort analysis is better than KissMetrics and MixPanel. If you are using MixPanel, you could consider shifting to Amplitude as it would mean thousands of dollars of saving.
16. Piwik — A free, open source analytics platform offering considerable customization options, Piwik can be a good starting point to measure e-commerce analytics for your WooCommerce Online Shop.
17. Hotjar — Getting data about how visitors behave on your online store is critical to success. It’s the all-in-one analytics platform which also allows you to gather feedback to convert visitors into customers.
18. Chartbeat — Combine Chartbeat with GoSquared to get real-time data about your visitors. Understand traffic break-down, and engagement metrics, and even monitor your social media channels.
19. WebTrends — Measure your customer interactions across multiple channels, get real-time insights, custom analytics reports, dynamically segment your target audience etc.
20. RulerAnalytics — Track visitor journeys, integrate Google Analytics, see keywords that Google Analytics has removed, and lot more.
21. Convertro — Get marketing insights to understand which ads work better for your website. The tool helps you decide budget allocation across channels at the most granular level, to maximize ad performance and accelerate growth.
22. MouseFlow — See your visitors’ behavior and fix pain points with recordings, heatmaps, funnels, and form analytics. It is built with focus on conversions.
23. BIME Analytics — Data in itself is just numbers. You will need tools to do meaningful analysis. BIME Analytics lets you make complete sense out of data by bringing all analytics tools into one place in the form of interactive dashboards and beautiful data visualization.
24. Totango — Totango is a customer success platform that helps recurring revenue businesses simplify the complexities of customer success by connecting the dots of customer data.
25. Lucky Orange — Record every visitor’s moves and see where they are navigating and how the actual on-site experience is. When your visitors are not converting, the tool will tell and show you everything they did before leaving your store.
26. Crazy Egg — See where visitors are clicking, what they are scrolling, etc. It creates heat maps to better understand your visitor behavior. It, however, does not provide deep insights. For beginners, the tool can be good to go with.
27. BareMetrics — One of the best tools out there to measure subscription analytics. Get insights for Stripe, Braintree and many more.
28. Looker — Give your team access to data, enabling anyone to ask and answer their questions, from a single, central source. Get rid of data analytics bottlenecks, drive your business with data, and make faster & better e-commerce decisions.
29. Periscope Data — This is a complete data analysis platform.
30. Metrilo — Get a complete overview of your store performance, get instant ecommerce analytics for WooCommerce, and have a CRM and an email personalization tool all in one place.
31. Quicklytics — Quicklytics is simply the easiest and fastest way to check your Google Analytics account on your iPhone or iPad. Check the visitor information of multiple websites in a matter of seconds, not minutes.
32. SessionCam — It’s a Customer Experience Analytics software to help you understand how users interact with your website to improve usability and conversion. Find out and fix the conversion problems with SessionCam.
33. Gauges — Get the best out of your website traffic with real-time data from Gauges. Focus on the most actionable ecommerce metrics. Understand how many visitors are coming to your store, from where they are arriving, and where they are going.
34. FullStory — Find out in detail about your customers’ experience using FullStory. Understand who added which items to the cart but didn’t proceed to the checkout, record, track, analyze user sessions, and do much more. Helps you take better care of your customers.
35. HeatSync — E-commerce is a competitive space. You need to know what your competitors are up to these days. HeatSync brings together your website’s and competitor’s website analytics together to offer you invaluable competitive insights.
36. BriefMetrics — Similar to QuillEngage, it sends you data in a simplified form from Google Analytics. Get information on views, revenue, bounce rate, ad clicks, impressions, etc. straight to your inbox. Perfect way to save time digging into data.
37. PopCorn Metrics — Track customers based on the actions they take and send data into your marketing and analytics tools. Track user logins, customer searches, segment customers, revenues, and funnels.
38. Quill Engage — Having difficulty in getting the most out of Google Analytics e-commerce tracking data? Use QuillEngage to simplify understanding the data, generate custom reports, etc. It’s a free tool that sends data from GA to your inbox every week. If you run more than two sites, there are affordable plans.
39. Inspectlet — The tool has a more detailed tracking system for analyzing the individual movement of visitors on a site. See user activities, use it like a heatmap, find out issues with your site’s UI, record and watch videos of sessions, what users are doing, etc. It also offers mouse tracking.
40. Formisimo — Optimize your checkout process with Formisimo. It gives rich insights into what people are doing on your checkout page. Formisimo also tells you where people drop out from the checkout, which part is taking more time to complete etc.
41. Heap Analytics — Manually setting up event tracking can be a pain in the **s. Heap takes away that pain from you. When you are doing retroactive analytics and testing to optimize your online store’s design and do some UX changes, Heap helps you look into past events that you might have skipped. Using Heap with Google Analytics can help you decipher the data better.
42. ChartMogul — Running a subscription-based online business with WooCommerce? ChartMogul is a must-have tool in 2017.
43. TapAnalytics — If you want to know how your marketing campaigns are performing, you could try TapAnalytics. Helps bring in data from Google Adwords, Bing Ads, etc. to let you know where you stand.
44. Adobe Marketing Cloud — An expensive option, but AMC is a well-known customer analytics tool often used by biggies. So, unless you are a larger store owner, it might take you some time to use this tool. Nevertheless, the tool offers amazing, detailed real-time insights on customer segmentation, customer journeys, etc. to help you understand everything about your customers’ on-site behavior.
45. YoGrow — Another simple analytics tool for e-commerce tracking in WooCommerce, YoGrow is free to use if you run a single WooCommerce store. It supports several other platforms.

Let us know which tool works for you better. 

FAQs

How do I integrate GA4 with WooCommerce?

Integration between GA4 and WooCommerce can be achieved through a plugin. The ‘Enhanced Ecommerce Google Analytics for WooCommerce’ plugin by Dotstore is a good option. You install and activate the plugin, then enter your GA4 ‘Measurement ID’ in the ‘Google Analytics ID’ section of the plugin’s setting to set up the integration.

Can Google Analytics track eCommerce?

Yes, Google Analytics can track eCommerce. It offers both basic ‘eCommerce’ and ‘Enhanced eCommerce’ tracking capabilities that allow you to measure user interactions with products on eCommerce websites across the user’s shopping experience.

What is WooCommerce Google Analytics?

Enhanced Ecommerce Google Analytics for WooCommerce is a plugin that integrates Google Analytics with your WooCommerce store. It allows you to leverage the tracking capabilities of Google Analytics to understand your customers’ behavior, track sales, product performances, and other valuable eCommerce data on your WooCommerce website.

Is there a better tool than Google Analytics?

Although Google Analytics is one of the most popular tools for digital analytics, there may be alternatives much better suited to specific business needs. For example, some businesses may benefit from specialized tools, such as Adobe Analytics for more advanced analysis features, or Mixpanel for analyzing user behavior on sites and apps. It’s all about finding a balance between comprehensiveness, usability, and relevance to your business’s specific data needs.